1949 Top Ten List

The Third Man (Carol Reed)

White Heat (Raoul Walsh)

Adam's Rib (George Cukor)

Jour de fête (Jacques Tati)

The Heiress (William Wyler)

The Small Back Room (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)

Le Silence de la mer (Jean-Pierre Melville)

On the Town (Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen)

Twelve O'Clock High (Henry King)

The Fountainhead (King Vidor)

Additional 1949 Films By Rating

Border Incident (Anthony Mann)

The Window (Ted Tetzlaff)

Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer)

Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin)

Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa)

Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu)

The Set-Up (Robert Wise)

Pinky (Elia Kazan)

Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak)

Three Strange Loves (Ingmar Bergman)

Side Street (Anthony Mann)

D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté)

The Queen of Spades (Thorold Dickinson)

For archival purposes, I file everything by the year it had its world premiere. Many of these films will have been commercially released in the U.S. a year or two later, so my lists won’t always match up with other folks’ lists.

Ratings are on a needlessly precise 100-point scale.

Films I haven’t yet rated on that scale are marked with if I currently think they belong in my top ten. These films are subject to being shifted around or yanked altogether at any moment, after I revisit them and they get a numeral. (Lists from prior to about 1988 are especially suspect, as I compiled them long ago from memories that were in many cases already pretty dusty.)

Seen but currently unrated (and not presumptively among my top 10): All the King's Men (Rossen); The Barkleys of Broadway (Walters); The Big Steal (Siegel); A Letter to Three Wives (Mankiewicz); The Reckless Moment (Ophüls); Reign of Terror (Mann); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford); Shockproof (Sirk); Tension (Berry); Under Capricorn (Hitchcock)

As yet unseen: Caught (Ophüls); I Was a Male War Bride (Hawks); Intruder in the Dust (Brown)

I occasionally write reviews of older movies, but it happens too infrequently to file them by year.